The “Sign of Tanit” Posture

by Marianne Carroll

While Googling the whereabouts of a friend’s birthday celebration last Summer in Ibiza, Spain, I stumbled upon the role Ibiza played in Carthaginian culture since 900 BCE and the 2,000 year-reign of the goddess Tanit, captured in many of the ceramic pots still made on Ibiza today. Tanit, called “The Mother of the Gods,” ruled over the Sun, Moon and stars and was the goddess of stargazers and astrologers. She even had her own abstract symbol that was peculiarly hers. As I was contemplating the planetary alignments for my upcoming Leo New Moon ritual posture workshop, I was so captivated by their geometric patterns and the similarity to her sign that I sensed “The Sign of Tanit” might be a symbolically encoded ritual posture. I decided to embark on an inquiry using what Dr. Goodman called “spiritual archeology” to determine if this might be the case.

As we’ve been taught by the spirits of the Alternate Reality, once we are holding the posture in trance, we can ask them directly for further information to guide our inquiry. What none of us was quite prepared for was the incredibly strong energy that flowed through each of us – it felt both initiatic and transformative. Andy felt “I was the All, I was everything, everything was me. And then that started morphing into: I was the goddess, I was Earth Mother, I was making love to Earth Mother, I was giving birth — all at the same time. You can’t do one without doing the other. It was all creation.” Rachel felt it “releasing a fire and creating liquidity…birthing something new into existence through joy and nurturance while also accepting the old.” We all felt extremely intense, strong currents of energy course through our bodies that was a galactic fusion across time and space. Tanit (pronounced “Tah NEET”) let all of us present know we’d re-awakened the goddess-creator consciousness who was most grateful to have come alive in us, once again.

In subsequent sessions with “The Sign of Tanit”, I have come to associate her with the Gnostic myth of Sophia (a divine cosmic power). My deepest gratitude to those who have enthusiastically joined me in discovering our body’s natural ability to tap into the cosmic wisdom of her creative force directly and to learn how to ground and balance it here with Gaia’s living consciousness.